So I'm still alive and still moving. The project I was working lasted 8 months of consistently overtime work with no clear direction of when anything was due and requirements never established even after the 8 month mark. My time was dominated by two products where one of them must have gone through 11 revisions and the other about 7 revisions before analysis was stopped and drawings were issued. It became typical to come in and be notified that some big due date is 2 days away and we were needed to work extra hard to meet that timeline. It pains me so much that I wasn't able to drive the project this time by making definitive decisions since I was still figuring out how Raytheon does business and their engineering dogma. Fortunately, the following two months were dominated by reporting our results where I was able to claim scope and dictate what I could provide within the given time frame. Consequently, my group was initially chastised for pushing back on unrealistic deadlines but when the date came and we were the only group able to produce results, I did get a little feeling of vindication. Not that finishing meant anything to management though considering I got a complaint that we were holding everyone else up despite having already submitted our portion.
The new project I'm on is also a new design and like most new designs it has a plethora of problems and is extremely time intensive. I've worked it for about a month and with a little help from a colleague we've been able to down select the requirements and spin through 2.5 designs on 6 integrated items (VERY AMBITIOUS and I am still seriously fatigued). I'm still having issues with some of the detail elements now and the model I have is out of date but does provide insight to the gross state of stress so more changes are coming but our final form is basically in place.
Having said all that I've done some programming on my own predominantly in C++ and getting XERCES patched into my program so I can try out a method of SQL statement development where I package atomic commands inside of XML statements. The hope is the atomic SQL commands are easier to debug than the way I was submitting SQL commands into SQLite before. The problems I was having was in using a string stream I would miss subtle spaces between variables and the database would puke on me. I'm also editing my puke reporting methodology since I didn't do a great job of puke reporting initially.
That about covers it... I really need to get better at checking in here....